Thursday, October 27, 2016

One Last Pick Through the Bins, Volume 1: Wu-Tang Clan

Literally, the first image under "hip hop."

I don’t want to say that I’m ignorant about hip-hop, but I
just googled it because I wasn’t super-clear on whether or not it’s hyphenated. (The
answer: “it depends”). “Ignorant” goes a little too far, though, because what I
really mean is that, down the years, a couple other genres got in the way, and
I went pretty deep on those, so, what I’m saying is, I approach this stuff with
due humility. (And, till further notice, this site's naming convention is "hip hop," sans hyphen.)

“Me, Myself & I” sent me to the record store to
buy De La Soul’s Three Feet High & Rising when it came out. During my
freshman year in college, a friend of a friend passed on a mixed tape...hold
on, that word has a different meaning now. By that I mean, I knew a guy who put a bunch
of rap on a cassette tape - e.g., Boogie Down Productions, Poor Righteous Teachers,
Big Daddy Kane and Eric B. & Rakim. Some exposure did happen, and beyond
“Yo, MTV Raps.” The point is, most of the exposure came to me, not vice versa.

And yet leading with ignorance makes sense because it fits
my relationship to the first artists I’m exploring for this project: The
Wu-Tang Clan. It’s also why starting this entire project with a hip hop act
just feels…right. If there’s a purpose to the whole thing, it’s exploration –
answering the question of why something connected, regardless of when it
connected. So, to lean into that ignorance as hard as I can without falling
off, I had no idea that Wu-Tang dates back to the first half of the 1990s - completely missed that. I’d heard of Method Man (part of Wu-Tang) and Red Man
(not part of Wu-Tang; turns out they’re cousins) in a couple fish-out-of-water movies from the early-aughts, but didn’t know to connect him to Wu-Tang. For
years, Ol’ Dirty Bastard was the only Wu-Tang member I could confidently identify as Wu-Tang, even if just related, and that only came when he died.

So, like the rest, Wu-Tang came to me. By that I mean,
I’d heard songs by either Wu-Tang (“Gravel Pit”), or individual members (“Baby, I Got Your Money” and “Shimmy Ya”; sensing a theme?), before I really knew where they came
from; later, I heard “A Day in the Life” on Handsome Boy Modeling School’s
White People. I wasn’t even sure if actual members of Wu-Tang featured in it (they did), but the songs hit all the same - the style, drag and sound on the vocals as much as anything else. And that’s the long and the short of how
you find a Wu-Tang album in a bin, decide to pick it up, take it home, and
upload it onto your hard drive.

That’s how I picked, The W. It’s a later work (just learned that), but, if pressed to pick a favorite from – and it doesn’t come easy – I’d
go with "Hollow Bones." "Redbull" might be a close second, but something about the echo
in the vocals and sampling, even the aching weariness of the phrase “Hollow
Bones,” keeps me on that one. It sounded like closing time to me, even as I know
it’s about something completely different (yeah, no, wasn’t even close). I couldn’t relate to that directly in a dozen years and with a totally different
life experience, but that’s the beauty of music: the simple act of listening to it automatically becomes evocative. (Even when the listening attains a comically misguided state.)

I want to go deeper at this point, and circle back to those
concepts of ignorance and humility. I am very, very comfortable pointing to
songs from various “rock” genres and saying, “yes, I like that,” and
can confidently defend the position. I suffer the opposite when it
comes to hip-hop. I put all of that out there in order to set up a confession:
yes, I literally googled several varieties of “what makes a hip hop song good.”
Not proud, but, I also found two sources that I appreciated (including one that
lead me to another piece that arbitrates the tricky waters of which of
Wu-Tang’s rappers is the best (and, by me, they did OK)). The first is an
article that both presents an argument and names names about the best rappers in hip-hop history. That’s both cool and will (might?) someday further research, but I
got the bigger kick out of a Vox.com video that deconstructs what makes a rhyme great (and I’ll get to MF Doom). And, holy shit, do they flag/explain
some really, really great, richly complex rhymes…

…yes, I know. That google search is, literally, the whitest,
most middle-aged thing a guy can do. I can only prostrate myself before the
altar of enthusiastic curiosity. And, further confession: the video
references Rakim, specifically this part where he talks about how he writes…and
that’s where I had a brief, “holy shit, am I racist?” panic. It had never
really occurred to me that rappers sit down and write lyrics and arrange beats.
I mean, of course, the rhymes get written down at some point, but I never imagined
so much a formal structure as men and women freestyling all of it, pulling
inspiration out of the ever-present ether, really, which is kinda cooler, but
also obvious bullshit. About ten seconds later, I realized that I projected the
same illusion on to all musicians, at least outside of classic composers. Jazz,
rock, country: when I think of people “composing,” they’re never writing it
down, penciling notes into those lines of music; I pictured very happy people touched
by the muse, sitting in a room together and just...I don't know, making music, etc. Look, wish I was kidding, too.

To pick up something above, and to wrap up this post, I’ve always had a
favorite rapper in Wu-Tang: it's RZA, because I just like the thickness of his voice. ODB comes as a close second, and not just because he shares my love of piano and
beats; Ghostface Killah rounds up my top three, but he tops the article linked to way up there, e.g. Wu-Tang's best).
Trouble is, except for Ol’ Dirty Bastard, I didn’t know who was who by voice. I turned to Spotify for that, if only to see if my ear could pick each Wu-Tang guy to his solo project. A shit-load of great songs came out of that search (and, dammit, I should have kept going), like “Soul & Substance” by Masta Killa, “Dirty Dirty” by ODB, “City High” by Inspectah Deck, “Gold” by GZA, “Grits” by RZA
(super-fond), and an arrestingly affecting cover of The Pretenders “It’s a Thin Line Between Love and Hate,” which showed up on Ghostface Killah’s 36 Seasons.

There’s a big, beautiful world out there.
Really, really good music, specifically. There’ll never be enough time for most
of it, so I try to keep happy about all the good stuff I hear. And can hear at
any time with a couple quick searches. In a sound/interjection, eeeee!